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Calling all women: Porch View Dances is mustering what co-founder Karen Kaeja calls “the Wedding Brigade.” It’s the latest innovation in an annual outdoor dance event that animates Toronto’s Seaton Village neighbourhood by bringing together professional choreographers and local residents in a celebration of community.

This year, Karen Kaeja and her husband Allen are marking the 25th anniversary of their company, Kaeja d’Dance, which happens to coincide with their 25th wedding anniversary; reason enough to focus the latest Porch View Dances, a more recent company offshoot, on domestic relationships.

The basic format remains unchanged. The audience gathers at an appointed location before being guided through the neighbourhood, stopping along the way outside specific homes to watch participating families perform a dance they’ve devised in collaboration with a professional choreographer.

The event will conclude with a “Flock Landing” finale in Vermont Square where everyone is invited to boogie. To animate the journey from house to house, the Kaejas have always introduced other performance elements, “dance vignettes” as they call them, along the way. This year they’re stepping it up with “The Wedding Brigade.”

It’s choreographed and directed by Karen Kaeja, who explains that she conceived it as a way of honouring the longevity of love and family. Her open call for participants has to date recruited close to 50 women of all ages who will be dressed symbolically in white. As the audience moves from house to house, the women will weave through the crowd in the opposite direction.

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“It’s a metaphorical way of emphasizing that to make a relationship work you have to be fluid,” she explains. “You have to negotiate your way through life. It’s a representation of love.”

The Wedding Brigade is not the only way that Allen and Karen Kaeja are putting a special emphasis on coupledom with this year’s Porch View Dances.

In previous years, individual choreographers were assigned to each home. This year, the Kaejas invited committed couples Michael Caldwell and Louis Laberge-Côté, and Ofilio Sinbadinho and Apolonia Velasquez, all of whom are also dancers and choreographers. The Kaejas themselves are working with a single father and teenage daughter duo, Greg and Maya.

“In a way it’s more challenging,” says Karen. “It’s not just one choreographer imparting his or her esthetic. How do we fuse our personal preferences?”

“It’s an interesting dialogue,” says Allen. “We’re experiencing their particular family dynamic as they experience us working together. In a way it’s a quartet, but we’re drawing on their stories.”

For the performers it’s been an exciting experience.

“When I suggested it to Maya, I thought she’d probably not want to be seen dancing with her dad,” says Greg. “In fact, she was really keen and is totally jazzed about it. As for Allen and Karen it’s incredible what they draw from us and they’re so good at explaining the physics of movement. Performing with Maya is for me a sweet spot in life.”

Maya, 13, says it’s been “so cool” watching the choreography come together from an idea to a dance. “And I’ve learned that hard work and commitment can also be super fun.”

Caldwell and Laberge-Côté are working with a group of three unrelated but firm women friends, Diana, Elizabeth and Sonia. Diana’s porch will serve as the venue. All have some sort of dance background, even if not professionally. It’s a bonus in terms of bringing out their physical expression.

“They’re fearless and very open to whatever we propose,” says Laberge-Côté. “But you try to meet the community where they’re at. In the end it’s not so much about us making a work as about giving the performers a good experience.”

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